Introducing the New Artificial Intelligence Denoiser

What if I told you by clicking a button in SOLIDWORKS Visualize, you could instantly render 10x faster? Would your world change? What you would do with all that extra time given back to your life? Would you actually believe me?!?

Well I’m proud to say this is not a dream and very much a reality. A brand new super-feature is coming to SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2018 SP3! It’s called the AI (Artificial Intelligence) Denoiser.

Created by the innovative folks at NVIDIA, the AI Denoiser was born from machine learning and artificial intelligence, studying thousands of images and sample project files. This AI Denoiser allows Visualize to anticipate and magically eliminate noise in your scene. What does this mean? You can expect the same photo-quality results 10x faster!! Not only does it help your final renders finish 10x faster, you can also enjoy this dramatic speed-up while preparing your Visualize scenes as well. I’ve been testing the Denoiser the last couple months and it’s blown me away.

Completing any Visualize render job 10x faster is truly game-changing. This could be a still image, animation, camera fly, exploded view, new 360-VR content, etc – all 10 times faster than how it’s currently rendered today. Visualize is already known for fast rendering, but this AI Denoiser takes our render speeds to another stratosphere. This truly makes Visualize the fastest and easiest to use visualization tool on the market – period.

And for those wondering, yes, the AI Denoiser will work in both Fast and Accurate render modes. To fully take advantage of this new super-feature, you’ll need to adjust the final render settings. If you used to put 3,000 passes for Accurate, now you only have to enter 300 passes. Since rendering is 10x faster with the Denoiser, you can enter 10x fewer render passes! 5,000=500; 2,500=250; 1,000 = 100; 500=50 and so on. You might be able to lower the pass count even more – totally up to you!

The AI Denoiser will be available with SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2018 SP3, both Standard and Professional!

Here’s a video within Visualize showing the side-by-side results of the AI Denoiser’s powerful performance boost:

MORE SIDE-BY-SIDE AI DENOISER EXAMPLES:

PLEASE NOTE:
In order to take advantage of this awesome new super-feature, you will need an NVIDIA graphics card that has at minimum 4GB of memory (VRAM). Your graphics card will also have to be the Kepler-series or newer. Click here for a list of supported NVIDIA graphics cards that will work with the new AI Denoiser. Newer laptops meeting the minimum of 4GB VRAM (ex: M2000M) will also support the new AI Denoiser. Visualize will still run normally on lesser laptops, just without the new AI Denoiser speed boost. If your graphics card is not on this list, then please consider upgrading to take advantage of the 10x faster rendering performance.

DROPPING FERMI SUPPORT:
The update to include the AI Denoiser means we can no longer support very old NVIDIA graphics card of the Fermi generation. These cards no longer supported are Quadro FX series and Quadro x000. Updating to Visualize 2018 SP3 and newer with these outdated cards will result in Visualize not using your GPU and run in CPU-only mode. To continue using Visualize with your Fermi generation GPU, please remain on Visualize 2018 SP2 and do not update to new versions until you have a graphics card of Kepler generation or newer. Please reference this Wikipedia page for all NVIDIA graphics cards ever made, with their chip generation.

BONUS:
When we introduce the AI Denoiser in Visualize 2018 SP3, that same Visualize version will also have support for ‘fading’ geometry using the new Opacity slider in FAST mode. This means you don’t have to use Accurate mode and can now use FAST mode to ‘fade’ the geometry in your scene. This ‘fading’ can then be animated using Visualize Professional for some really dramatic animations.

Don’t forget to follow SOLIDWORKS Visualize Product Manager @bhillner on Twitter for product news and updates, and share your SOLIDWORKS Visualize creations here and on social media with #swvisualize and #gettinvizzy!